Proponents of temporal neutrality have challenged the intuitive appeal of future-bias: The intuitive appeal of future-bias is limited to a set of isolated cases that involve only hedonic and self-regarding goods and harms. They suggest that we should treat future-bias as irrational in self-regarding hedonic cases too, or at least not treat the intuitive appeal as evidence for future-bias's permissibility, since hedonic and non-hedonic cases are relevantly similar. This paper defends the rationality of future-bias against this concern. Firstly, hedonic goods (...) and harms mostly concern well-being at a time, while the proposed non-hedonic goods concern lifetime goodness. This is a relevant structural difference between hedonic and non-hedonic goods and harms that warrant different attitude patterns, including the applicability of future-bias. Secondly, the degree of idealisation required to make intuitions favour temporal neutrality obscures the weight of intuitions to a level that makes it unreliable as evidence against the permissibility of future-bias. As temporal neutralists need this degree of idealisation of their cases, the argument fails. In summary, we can keep using intuitive support as evidence for future-bias's rationality, at least when it comes to hedonic goods, but to some extent for its general permissibility. (shrink)

It is often claimed that liberalism is falsely and perniciously universalist. I take this charge seriously, exploring three positions: the communitarians’, Rorty’s, and that of “comprehensive” liberalism. After explaining why universalism is thought impossible, I examine the communitarian view that value is determined within communities and argue that it results in a form of relativism that is unacceptable. I next discuss Richard Rorty’s liberal acceptance of “conventionalism” and explain how, despite his rejection of universalism, Rorty remains a liberal. I then (...) present a defense of universalism, based in part on arguments that parallel Thomas Nagel’s arguments in defense of a “view from nowhere” and Jean Hampton’s objectivist arguments against Rawls’s moves to a “merely political” theory. That defense requires that we can distance ourselves from our ends to make moral judgments shorn of all partialities. (shrink)

In a White House ceremony on May 16, 1997, President Clinton issued an apology on behalf of the nation for the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, a forty-year research project in which African-American men were deceived and denied treatment in order to document the natural course of syphilis. Reflection on this occasion can give us pause to take pride in the progress made toward more ethical research with humans. The President's apology is perhaps the most public of a number of recent events (...) representing a renewed attention to ethics in research with human participants. Alongside it stand the efforts of treatment activists for people with acquired immune deficiency syndrome and the revelations of the human radiation experiments. In 1995, President Clinton called for the creation of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, which was charged with a host of projects aimed at investigating the organization and function of the federal system for overseeing human subjects research in the United States, and giving guidance on specific forms of research. (shrink)

We theorize that victim anonymity is an important factor in ethical decision making, such that actors engage in more self-interested and unethical behaviors toward anonymous victims than they do toward identifiable victims. Three experiments provided empirical support for this argument. In Study 1, participants withheld more life-saving products from anonymous than from identifiable victims. In Study 2, participants allocated a sum of payment more unfairly when interacting with an anonymous than with an identifiable partner. Finally, in Study 3, participants cheated (...) more from an anonymous than from an identifiable person. Anticipated guilt fully mediated these effects in all three studies. Taken together, our research suggests that anonymous victims may be more likely to incur unethical treatment, which could explain many unethical business behaviors. (shrink)

Most medical research and a substantial amount of non-medical research, especially that involving human participants, is governed by some kind of research ethics committee (REC) following the recommendations of the Declaration of Helsinki for the protection of human participants. The role of RECs is usually seen as twofold: firstly, to make some kind of calculation of the risks and benefits of the proposed research, and secondly, to ensure that participants give informed consent. The extent to which the role of the (...) REC includes the former is not uncontroversial. Indeed, the most prevalent debate on the role of RECs sees liberals and strong paternalists arguing over the importance of informed consent given by competent agents versus the significance of making benevolent decisions on behalf of others. On the one hand, liberals argue for the rights of competent adults to decide for themselves the kinds and extents of risks to which they wish to expose themselves. On the other hand, proponents of strong paternalism raise concerns about the likelihood of participants being able to truly understand the complex data involved in research. They support a role for RECs in which they exercise duties of benevolence towards patients and participants by limiting the extent to which they can be exposed to significant, permanent and irreversible harms. In this paper, we will argue that when it comes to decisions about risk it is neither possible nor desirable for RECs to adopt either role. (shrink)